February 10, 2012

Good and bad news; boatyard progress; etc

By Kris

First things first.  The bad news: our cruising plans, which had been set to begin right around now, have been indefinitely postponed.  The good news: they were postponed because I accepted an offer to continue at Voxel in New York, which in a twist of fate was bought by Internap a month ago and now needs someone to take charge of integrating the two companies’ technology.  Probably I should have known better than to think I could sail away easily.  Plus, even if the Voxel offer hadn’t appeared, I also had another amazing offer-you-cannot-refuse pop up in San Fransisco around the same time, so the cards, as it turned out, were pretty well stacked against us going sailing.

The plan for now is to leave the boat in the yard in Langkawi.  Everything takes longer than expected, so there is still plenty of work to be done; and I’ve given them some more jobs to do with the extra time.  Beyond that, a lot of options are on the table.  I’ve had some initial conversations with a couple of delivery captains, and I’m seeking quotes from shipping companies too.  It may in the end prove that the rational decision is to sell the boat here, or at least nearer by, and buy a new one in the US; but then, not much about boats is rational, so we’ll see.  What I do want to avoid is letting the boat languish unused in Malaysia indefinitely.

We’re flying to NYC tonight.  I spent most of last week in Langkawi getting the boat tidied up for an extended absence and going over what’s been done and what’s left to do with Barry, the owner of the yard.

It had been a while since I was last there, but most of that time was taken up with painting the deck — a huge job thanks to all the sanding and masking around tons and tons of hardware.  It turned out wonderfully:

The new paint is spotless and shiny.  I’m really happy with it.  I ended up asking them to paint everything white, including the nonskid areas.  The nonskid was done by sprinkling on fine-grained filtered sand and then overcoating, and it’s perfect: much less slick than the old nonskid but not so coarse as to be uncomfortable.  Here’s a closeup, though it’s still hard to see the nonskid in a photo:

They also painted some peripheral hardware like the steering pedestal and the anchor windlass housing:

With all the nice new paint I’ve asked the yard to throw a few tarps over the deck to minimize the UV damage while the boat is laid up.

The dodger modifications were also mostly finished.  There’s now a roof covering about 1/4 to 1/3 of the cockpit, and it’s much better engineered than the last one — curved to keep water from pooling and add strength, and with a nice lip to hang on to and direct water runoff.  The little “tank windows” are now gone and replaced with some nice big openings that offer a great field of view without craning my neck:

The glass isn’t installed yet as the paint needs to cure for a week or so before any sealant is applied.  The glass is cut though, from some polycarbonate I had left after making the other dodger windows.  Here’s a view of the cockpit from aft:

The yard also nicely faired the cockpit coaming where the old roof supports were:

The carpenter used my teak to build a nice, finger jointed box that mounts around the pedestal guard.  I traced a cutout on the box for flush mounting the chartplotter.  Once that’s cut, and the edges are rounded and some varnish is applied, this longstanding job will finally be done.

Here’s a random photo of the new solar panels Charlene asked me to take.  They’re doing their job well so far.

I met with Barry and Wendy and Rob, canvas makers, to discuss the bimini.  There had been some confusion about how to engineer a frame so that a bimini top with side and aft flaps could be mounted.  We ended up deciding to add a removable crossbar on the solar panel frame, and some tensioned cables between the solar panel frame and the new dodger roof.  The bimini top will mount to the cables on each side, to the dodger roof in front, and to the crossbar behind; and that layout matches the cockpit coaming pretty closely so flaps can be deployed as necessary.

Wendy and Rob also brought by some nice new Sunbrella covers they’d made for my outboard and my LPG tanks; I left the old ones on in the meantime though.

Down below, the only real job that got finished was installing tank gauge senders in the stainless water tanks:

I haven’t gotten around to wiring up and calibrating the water and fuel tank senders yet but it should be an easy job.

Barry also fabricated a new SS boarding ladder for me, using a CAD drawing I gave him.  The current ladder is telescoping and only has three rungs — it’s really, really hard to get out of the water.  The new ladder is folding but will use the same mounting brackets as the old ladder, and it has seven rungs — luxurious!  They are going to try to use some more of my teak to add steps, since climbing up metal pipes is not very comfortable.  Here’s the ladder folded:

And here it is opened up:

Most of what I spent my time on while I was there was just getting everything organized and clean — after all the jobs done in the last few months, particularly those in the cabin, everything was a real mess.  I spent two days scrubbing and dusting in the cabin.  Of course I also had to pack some stuff to bring back to NYC:

Luckily the scale at the airport check-in counter was broken.

I stayed on the boat in the yard instead of getting a hotel.  It’s a lot easier to live on the boat now that most of the in-cabin work is all done.  My favorite thing about staying in the yard, though, is this awesome shower they have:

It may look ugly, but there is nothing as refreshing after a long hot day as taking a cool rain shower, with great water pressure, under the stars and the moon.  Usually you’re also accompanied by a few frogs who like to hang out around the shower, which I think is great.

I happened to get a quick ride one day from Barry’s son Ryan and found out what happened to the SS chain they used to lift my new engine:

He welded it together.  Pretty unique idea!

I also managed to squeeze in just a little bit of relaxing.  A nice dinner and drink on the beach in Cenang:

And one last evening watching the sun set and relaxing in the shiny new cockpit:

Just behind Oia is a salty old dude on a beast of a boat, called Mara, from Juneau, Alaska.  Thought I’d take a photo of the boat because it’s just so awesome, in a cluttered, beat up, but totally functional kind of way:

But the best boat in the yard, of course, is Oia!  Here she is looking grand:

Now it’s off to the airport to fly to Manhattan.  I’m sure there will be plenty more boat updates here, but in the meantime maybe we’ll have some slightly more urban adventures to write about as well.

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December 28, 2011

Langkawi GPS track

By Kris

Thanks to a simple script written by someone else having the same GPS data exporting problems as I with their Lowrance HDS chartplotter, I was able to extract all the GPS data from the trip up to Langkawi.  I have no idea how the guy got the USR4 file format info from Lowrance; I asked for the same thing multiple times and was ignored.  But now that it’s documented in his code I may try my hand at adding support for USR4 to gpsbabel (probably read-only).

In the meantime I updated my map of Oia‘s travels with the Langkawi tracks.  The trip was right around 540 nm over about eight and a half days, for an average SOG of about 2.6 kts.  Not very fast.


View Larger Map

There’s a bigger and easier to navigate version here.

 

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December 13, 2011

Quick trip to the boatyard

By Kris

A week ago I took a quick trip up to Langkawi for a few days to see how things were coming along in the boatyard and do a little work of my own there.

The first thing I noticed was the beautiful new topsides paint, which is polished to perfection.  It’s a tiny bit darker than the old paint.

I spent most of my weekend finishing up all the chartplotter wiring and mounting of the new pedestal guard.  It’s now just awaiting a teak enclosure from the carpenter in which the chartplotter will be mounted.

I did some more debugging of the NDC-4 NMEA multiplexer which had stopped working enroute to Langkawi, and found it was just due to a loose power wire amid the tangle of wires in the nav electronics area, which I’ve been meaning to clean up but haven’t yet.  So that’s fixed.  I also ran a cable for an Icom HM-157 remote mic which will go in the cockpit; I’m going to pick up an M-422 DSC radio to replace my ancient non-DSC one.

While I was away the yard had gotten a bunch of other stuff done.  They installed some coaming boxes for me in the cockpit coaming:

The rudder was (mostly) dropped out to clean up calcification on the rudder stock and replace the bearings, which were pretty worn.  Unfortunately the rudder couldn’t quite come all the way out without another lift.

The old cutless bearing, where the prop exits the hull, was removed for replacement.  The old bearing had a bronze housing so it was pretty hard to get out; the new one will have a fiberglass housing and nice vulcanized rubber.

In the cabin, the carpenter did a great job of cutting two new small hatches in the cabin sole for access to the tops of the two fuel tanks.  Aside from the new varnish, you’d never know they weren’t always there:

Beneath those, they’d drilled into the powdered steel tanks and screwed and sealed on the BEP TS1 ultrasonic tank senders:

I started working on running the wiring for the fuel tank senders — a tricky job that involved a long flexible pickup tool, some fishing line, and a lot of patience, since there is no easy access except to the tops of the tanks.  Ran out of time (and wire) to fully finish the job, and I’ll still need some more time to calibrate the senders as well.

Up above, the yard had mostly finished sanding the deck in preparation for painting:

While they were at it they sanded the teak handrails; I asked them to go ahead and sand and varnish all the brightwork — which is really just the handrails and the gunnel cap rails.  If all the rest of the boat’s exterior is going to look shiny and new, might as well do up the teak too.

They even sanded some of the chipped paint off the windlass; it’ll get a new coat or two:

While I was there the carpenter was getting started (and mostly finished) with finishing off the dodger, which was left rough after the old roof was cut off.  We ended up deciding to keep the panel with the little “tank windows” — which will be cut much larger and replaced with nice big panes of polycarbonate, since I have lots of that sitting around.  Above that, a small segment of roof will be extended back a couple of feet to protect the helm.  The carpenter made some nice curved support for the roof, and put on a lip at my request to keep out water and give me something to grab.  They also gave the whole thing a nice curve (the support in the center is temporary, obviously):

Here’s a view from the side from down below:

By now the whole thing should probably be glassed over.  They still need to make a folding bimini frame; a cloth bimini will extend above the hard roof and provide nice cover for the whole cockpit.  The canvas maker will be making some flaps so the whole cockpit can still be enclosed as before, which is probably going to be necessary in colder climates.

The real highlight of my short visit was the engine.  It’s now all installed, aligned, and ready to go aside from one or two remaining small tasks.  Pete cleaned everything up nicely and put the galley back together.  Here’s the new engine:

The big remaining issue is installing a waterlock box in the exhaust outlet hose (which is the big black hose in the above photo).  It’s surprising there wasn’t one there before.  The space constraints are tight, and it doesn’t look like an off-the-shelf box is going to fit, so I asked Barry to make one from fiberglass, which he agreed was the best approach.

The shiny new dual Racor fuel filter setup is a lot simpler and cleaner than the old custom dual filter contraption.  The only downside is there is now no electric fuel lift pump.  I may install one eventually, but it’s not a big deal for now.

Here’s the new engine from the front:

Pete cleaned up the engine plumbing pretty nicely.  There is still a bit of a mess related to the watermaker plumbing, but that will get cleaned up as I work on re-commissioning the watermaker.  An old through-hull that was used for a no-longer-functioning speed log is being repurposed as watermaker and domestic saltwater intake.

Pete came by the yard for a little while to go over the install with me.  Nothing too complicated to see as the engine is pretty straightforward.  We stuck a garden hose in the raw water strainer and ran the engine.  It started instantly, sounded really smooth, throttled up effortlessly, and stopped instantly thanks to the nice “stop” button on the new instrument panel.  I wish I’d had my video camera handy.  The throttle lever is on the engine is reverse that of the old engine, and flipping that around at the steering pedestal side is the only other real remaining engine related task.

Not sure when I’ll get back to Langkawi again — probably not until after Christmas — but in the meantime the yard’s got a lot to go on.

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December 10, 2011

Living aboard a boat in Singapore — Part 2: Getting started

By Kris

A while back I wrote some thoughts about why you might want to live aboard a boat in Singapore.  I continue to get a lot of questions from people who are partly or wholly convinced, and now want to know how.  So here is some of what I have to say about the mechanics of getting a boat, bringing it to Singapore, and living aboard.

As always, what I have to say reflects only my own experiences.  If you are thinking of living aboard in Singapore, the route you take to make it happen will undoubtedly be shaped by your own preferences and plans and will end up looking a lot different than mine.  Here are some of my basic assumptions:

  • You’re not rich; if you are, you can buy your way out of most of the complications of getting a boat and living aboard and this isn’t a very interesting article.
  • You’re probably going to be maintaining your boat yourself, at least some of the time.
  • You need to live someplace convenient enough to go to work.

And of course, if you have more specific questions I haven’t addressed, feel free to email me at beevek at gmail dot com and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Buying a boat

If you’ve decided living aboard in Singapore is for you — or if you’re just thinking about it sort of seriously — then step one is the big one: finding a boat that’s right for you.  I am not going to go into all the details of picking the right boat for your lifestyle and budget and sailing plans and all that.  There are probably a zillion other discussions of the same thing out there.  Same goes for understanding what to look for when you’re inspecting boats.  But if you’re in Singapore and want to do some boat shopping, there are some special local considerations.

The first and most obvious is: where can you buy a boat?  Singapore itself is not a great market unless you’ve got loads of money and are looking for a brand new boat.  There are occasionally used boats for sale here that are in good shape (I’ve looked at some) but they are fairly rare.  Instead, I recommend taking trips up to Phuket and Langkawi, both cruising havens with lots of live-aboard-ready boats (mainly sailboats) for sale.  The strategy that worked for me was to shop around online with some of the various brokers in the region (start with Pippen Marine, Lee Marine, YBC, Boatshed Phuket, and Simpson Marine); come up with some candidate boats to look at; and schedule long weekend visits to Phuket and Langkawi.  Flights are cheapest — and selection is probably highest — just after the NE monsoon high season is over.  Arrange ahead of time with the brokers and they’ll be able to show you the boats you’re interested in and maybe recommend some others.

Your budget will largely determine the kind of boat you can end up with.  Here are some rough guesses as to what you can get for how much (as of around now, end of 2011).  That said, take them with a grain of salt and do your own research.

  • US$10-50k: You probably can find boats in this price range that are suitable for living aboard, but almost certainly they will need some work (especially at the lower end of the range).  If you’re interested in buying an older boat in need of some love and fixing it up yourself (or having it fixed up), you may find it useful to take some trips to boatyards.  They tend to be full of neglected boats that can be had for (relatively) cheap.
  • US$50-100k: This was the sweet spot I was trying to hit when I was shopping a couple years ago.  There are quite a few boats in this price range, usually between 35-45 ft, but you will need to shop carefully and make sure the boat’s worth what it’s being sold for.  You can probably get a sail-away ready to go boat in this price range, but you’ll probably also want to make some changes or upgrades.
  • US$100-300k: If you want a newer boat — say, something built in the last decade that’s in good condition — this is probably what you’ll be paying.  The same for somewhat older boats that have been very well taken care of.  My recommendation is to prefer the latter: a 20+ year old well appointed and maintained cruising boat is probably a lot sturdier and has had all the kinks worked out; newer boats may be shinier and roomier but they also tend to be made out of balsa wood.  Literally.  Anyway, that’s just my personal preference.

Remember when you’re shopping that you’re going to be living aboard in Singapore.  Certain equipment already aboard can be useful.  A marine air conditioner is a big plus.  You will need air conditioning.  You’ll probably find a window air conditioner in a hatch is the most common solution.  An AIS transponder is also useful, since you’ll be required to have one in Singapore waters.  Best to have any AC equipment ready to use 230V at 50Hz.  If you’ll be cooking aboard a lot, make sure you have electrical refrigeration instead of an engine-driven compressor so you can keep your fridge running at the dock without running the engine all the time.  A chartplotter and SE Asia charts are nice to have.  But don’t eliminate a boat from consideration if it’s missing those things — few boats will have them all, and you can always make changes and additions.

Once you’ve found the right boat, you’ll work with your broker to close the deal.  My recommendation — at least if you’re not Singaporean — is not to expect to find financing.  Pay cash.  That probably applies the same for Singaporeans if you’re buying your boat in Malaysia or Thailand.

Make sure you get a survey from an accredited marine surveyor.  Your broker can probably make recommendations.  I bought my boat in Phuket and had my survey done by Jeroen from Waterline Marine.  He did a great job, wrote a really thorough report that I still use as a reference today, and saved me US$5k by finding some issues I’d overlooked.  That’s the best reason to get a survey; but the other reason is that your insurer will require it anyway.  You’ll need to book your surveyor in advance and be flexible.  There aren’t many of them in Phuket and Langkawi so they’re busy guys.  Try to be there for the survey so your surveyor can show you what they find and talk to you about the boat.  Take a lot of photos while the boat’s out of the water, since if it’s a sail-away purchase you may not haul out again for a while, and understanding the lines of the boat below the waterline is useful.

Once you’ve bought your boat you’ll need to choose a port of registry and get insurance lined up.  Your broker probably has recommendations.  I registered my boat in Langkawi since it seemed easy and relatively inexpensive (and was both, despite some annoyances).  Many people choose other ports of convenience.  If you’re planning to have the boat in Singapore for a really long time, you may want to consider registering it as a Singaporean vessel, but be prepared to pay GST on the value of the boat, and deal with all the paperwork.  A foreign flagged vessel can stay in Singapore without issue; there are lots of technicalities and you may want to discuss them with MPA – but honestly, as long as you follow the port clearance and immigration procedures reasonably well, I think adhering strictly to every last regulation is not a concern.

If you’ve bought a boat outside of Singapore and are ready to bring it back, well, it’s a boat, so you should sail it here.  If you bought your boat in Phuket or Langkawi, you’ll be coming via the Straits of Malacca.  Don’t do the trip by yourself or with friends and family, on a boat you’re unfamiliar with, unless you’re an experienced sailor.  It’s one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and is also fraught with all sorts of other annoyances: poorly marked fishing nets, trawlers, sleeping tugboat captains towing huge unlit barges, sometimes-dramatic tidal currents, and fast-moving squalls.  If you ask around at marinas in Singapore or wherever your boat is, you can find an experienced delivery captain who will be happy to help you with the trip.

Where to keep your boat

Another huge consideration is where you should keep your boat once you’ve got it.  There are a number of marinas in Singapore.  Location will probably be your biggest factor, but availability is coming into play now too, as some marinas are quite full.  As far as I know, there is no place in Singapore waters where you can reasonably stay at a swing mooring or at anchor for long.  With all marinas, I recommend calling ahead and/or visiting them to check on berth availability and see whether the marina is for you.  I don’t know of any marinas in Singapore that would have a real problem with you living aboard, regardless of whatever policies they may have.

Most of my experience is with One 15 Marina in Sentosa as that’s where I’ve kept Oia.  There is a new dock at this marina, but it’s filling up fast.  When I sailed off for Malaysia in late October, there was a pretty reasonable liveaboard population at One 15.  My personal opinion is that it’s the best place to live aboard in Singapore: it’s away from the city and quiet, but it’s still fairly convenient to downtown.  There is an employee bus that you can take half-hourly through most of the day that brings you right to the Harbourfront MRT.  Entry by taxi or car is an annoyance: you’ll usually have to pay the Sentosa entry fee (between S$2-7 depending on day and time).  Sometimes you can argue your way out of it.  You need not be a member to keep your boat at One 15, and frankly I don’t think a membership is worth the exorbitant cost even though it reduces the berthing and fuel fees (marginally).  The finger pontoons are not the best (short and narrow), and the conditions can get a bit rolly, especially on the L/M dock where Oia was berthed.  The facilities are top-notch: great swimming pool, wonderful rain showers, and a few tasty (if expensive) restaurants.

Keppel Bay Marina is maybe even more conveniently located, but as far as I know there are no berths available.  I put myself on the waiting list there a year and a half ago and never heard a thing.  If you can somehow magically get a berth there, you’re in (long) walking distance to Harbourfront, surrounded by swanky apartments and restaurants, and probably have pretty darn nice facilities (though I haven’t really checked on that).

Raffles Marina is far from the city center — it’s about as far West as you can go in Singapore — but if you’re working out there or don’t mind a (really) long commute, it may be a great option.  It’s probably the favored marina in Singapore for cruising sailors.  It’s quiet and pleasant and as I recall has a bit more of a breeze than One 15, which can make things more livable.  It’s also very well protected.  Despite its location, Raffles costs about as much as One 15 and Keppel Bay.

RSYC seems like it’d be a great marina.  It’s where I was originally intending to keep Oia, until various mishaps resulted in our ending up at One 15 with a broken down engine.  It’s in a decently convenient location near Clementi; seems like more of a sailors’ marina; and as I recall is a bit less expensive.  But the one thing you will be consistently told by everyone who’s ever berthed there is that it’s rolly.  The ferry terminal generates wakes that will toss your boat around all day long.  For that reason it may not be the best place to live aboard.

There are a few other options, most notably SAF Changi and the Marina Country Club at Punggol, but they are both quite far East and NE, respectively, and I think much less frequented by the liveaboard crowd.

I’ve discussed berthing costs in the past; for a monohull somewhere around 38-45 ft you should be able to stay in one of the nicer marinas for something like S$850-1400/month including utilities.

Maintaining your boat

Singapore is not a do-it-yourself kind of place.  And when it is, the doing-it-yourself is mostly about houses or cars — rarely boats.  But it’s still a huge port, and it’s probably the best place in SE Asia to buy parts and equipment without having to order from overseas.  That said, it is also usually very, very expensive and many times I’ve found it’s cheaper to order and ship items from the US than to buy them here.  (As an aside: get a boat stamp made with the vessel’s name and registration details; if your vessel is foreign-flagged, you can use it to avoid paying GST on most  boat related purchases, and in any case most CIQP offices expect you to have it.)

I keep a list of vendors in Singapore that I’ve dealt with, usually including some notes about my experience with them.  Some are bad, others good, and a few really great to deal with.

At the top of that list are a few general-marine-service companies you can hire to do maintenance work on your boat.  I’ve gotten quite a few quotes for various jobs from them, but I’ve never once hired a marine contractor here to do anything serious on my boat because the costs in Singapore are just insane.  I once got a quote for S$5k+ to install fuel and water tank gauges in my boat.  I just got all the hard work for that job done in Malaysia for a couple hundred SGD.

For any major work, I think the best option is indeed to sail outside of Singapore.  There are a number of good boatyards in Malaysia and Thailand.  Parts and supplies are mostly a lot cheaper, and labor is much less expensive.  In my (limited) experience, workmanship is just as good.  For really critical stuff like repower jobs, canvas work, etc, ask around to find the best contractors (your broker from the boat purchase is probably a good place to start).

Sailing around Singapore

Singapore waters themselves are not so great for cruising around.  The port limit is only a few miles offshore, and if you’re planning to cross it you’ll need to do port clearance and immigration.  Within the port, there are hundreds upon hundreds of anchored cargo ships, tankers, and so on.  There are some good spots for day cruises, but not much beyond that.

Technically, you’re supposed to have a PPCDL to use your vessel within port limits.  I have never been able to figure out if that’s a requirement for foreign flagged vessels that are here for the long term.  MPA hasn’t given me the same answer twice.  The same is true of the cruising permits required for foreign flagged vessels — despite following all the right procedures, sometimes the marina staff I’ve worked with has said I’m not eligible for a cruising permit; and other times it’s granted without issue.  Most people I know just don’t bother.  But make sure you’re as up to date as you can be on what the rules and regulations are, since they seem to be fairly dynamic.

Port clearance is easy enough to do yourself: just go to the MPA OSDC office at Tanjong Pagar with a few copies of crew and passenger lists, general declaration forms, boat registration, etc.  Some marinas can do the clearance paperwork for you if you prefer.  Similarly, there are immigration facilities at some marinas, but normally I just do immigration at one of the two quarantine anchorages (Western near the Sister Islands, or Eastern near Changi, depending on the direction I’m sailing).

There are plenty of international destinations within reasonable range.  I’ve never made it to any of the Indonesian islands — they seem logistically kind of difficult — but both coasts of peninsular Malaysia are worth visiting.

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November 27, 2011

A couple weeks in the boatyard and around Langkawi

By Kris

After a little over a week back in Singapore to rest and work after reaching Langkawi, I flew back up for a couple weeks to spend some time working on the boat.  It was really busy with lots of things underway and accomplished.  We took quite a few photos; here are some.

When I left for Singapore (in a hurry) the boat was on stands right next to the wharf.  It had since been Travelifted into the yard with all the other boats:

Here’s a partial overview of the boatyard — it’s packed pretty tight, with quite a number of steel boats (mostly European):

While I was in Singapore, the engineer, Pete — an Australian — had gotten right down to business with the repower job.  By the time I got back to the boat he’d already dismantled the old engine and moved it out into the cockpit, and started cleaning up the bilge.  First thing I saw when I climbed aboard in the yard:

Actually, just as I was arriving some of the yard workers were finishing cutting the old cockpit roof off and tossing it over the side.  That left things pretty open:

Barry, the South African who owns the yard, had left a little more material behind than I was originally intending.  I’d originally planned to scrap the panel with the two crappy little “tank windows” and just leave a small lip to keep out the rain.  He had some interesting alternative ideas and ran them by me.  The plan has now morphed to replacing the little tank windows with big slabs of polycarbonate (I’ve got lots) for maximum visibility; then extending the roof at the original height back a foot or two to protect the helm.  No extra support will be needed to do that.  Then he’ll make me a nice bimini frame to fold forward from my solar panel rack, at pretty much the same height as the hard roof.  I spoke to a canvas maker named Wendy who will be making the bimini top, along with some removable flaps similar in some ways to what I had before so the entire cockpit can be enclosed in colder climates.

It actually didn’t take long at all to get used to the missing roof.  I think it looks a lot better:

Inside the boat the bilge was empty and pretty ugly looking, and the galley was slightly dismantled to improve access:

The prop shaft was in pretty good shape:

The old engine, less so:

The first day there was mostly spent taking stock of the boat and the yard, and cleaning up some of the mess I left when I had rushed off.  I had a really crappy rental car, an old Proton, and stayed in a decent little hotel in Kuah — the boat was not in a very livable state.

The new engine was still in its shipping crate in the yard.  We opened it up and it was lovely:

The yard used a crane to lift the old engine out of the cockpit and the new engine into it.  Here’s the tired old 4-107 flying through the air and actually not looking too shabby.  One of the more prominent features on this specific engine is the custom-built aft engine mounts; you can see they had the transmission sitting well below the engine bearers.  In fact the installation was so tight the starter motor had been resting on the actual hull.  Pete pointed out that my gearbox failure en route to Langkawi was caused by a sheared part in the gearbox flange — nothing I could have dealt with (or even really diagnosed) at sea.

The shiny new Beta 38 traded places with the 4-107.  The most obvious physical difference between the two engines is the size of the gearbox.  The old Paragon P-220 was really long and narrow; the new TMC-60P is a lot shorter but a bit fatter.  This made the installation fairly difficult and in the end, the engine needed to rest forward a bit, and required a new prop shaft since the old one was too short.

Before we moved the Beta 38 down to the engine bed I had one of the yard workers (who are all much smaller guys than I) crawl down in the bilge and give it a thorough cleaning with paint thinner, bilge cleaner, etc.

Then I had him sand and lay on a couple coats of chemical and fuel resistant paint.  There was no bright white available so I opted for a light grey.  What a difference some new paint makes (here after most of the first coat):

The old engine was down on the ground and in semi-decent shape, aside from the gearbox, a newly broken fuel line, and a few other minor things:

Within a couple days one of the yard workers approached me and asked for a price for the engine; he wanted to fix it up and sell it for use in a fishing boat.  In the end I sold it to him for US$800 cash and he and some buddies loaded it up into a truck.  Ciao, 4-107: you were a good engine.

While Pete worked on the engine installation I tackled a zillion other tasks.

I dumped all my anchor chain out of the chain locker and measured it.  Turns out it was 90m with markings every 15m, not every 10m as I’d guessed, so all along I’ve been letting out way more chain than necessary.  I cleaned the chain and repainted all the markings:

I also put some cable ties on each marking to indicate length; these work pretty well and don’t interfere with (or break because of) the windlass:

On my way out the other day I did notice a few weak links in the chain; will probably have to remove them and join with some connecting links.

I also worked on putting together a nice plexiglass cover for the electrical panel.  One of the unanticipated side effects of relocating the switch panel to the front of the electrical cabinet has been that when you lean over to grab stuff from the top-loading fridge, you tend to bump into electrical switches.  Not so great when you inadvertently switch off the autopilot.  I glued up, filed, sanded, and varnished some nice teak standoffs, got a 4mm piece of acrylic cut, and installed it all with some nice SS hinges and a latch.  Works great.

One of the two remaining old hatches in the boat (both in the dodger) had been leaking.  The acrylic had come unsealed and unseated.  Doug had repaired the other dodger hatch, which had a similar issue, about a year ago.  I’m getting pretty good with sealant, so I was able to repair this one in about 10 minutes.  I realized in making the electrical panel cover that acrylic is really cheap, so maybe one of these days I’ll remove the (horribly crazed and mostly opaque) glass again from these two old hatches and put some new glass in.

I went back to Singapore for a couple days for work.  Luckily flights are cheap.

At the boatyard, Charlene conquered the precarious boarding ladder to come take a look at the new engine (which was dangling from a chain block in midair at the time):

She wasn’t quite as impressed with the state of the cabin:

And she waited patiently while I failed at repairing the bilge pump pressure switch.  That engine compartment is pretty tight:

During the weekend we moved from Kuah to a new hotel in Cenang Beach, which is a bit more touristy and hence has more stuff to do, and we took some time to do a little sightseeing around Langkawi together.  I’ve been back and forth to Langkawi a bunch of times, but I’ve always been busy with boat stuff, so it was nice to take some time to see the island.

I’d gotten a new rental car — a Perodua Myvi, which seems kind of like a pseudo-ripoff of the Mini Cooper but was actually quite nice — and within a few days we covered most of the roads in Langkawi.

One of my favorite things we did was go for a ride in the Langkawi cable car.  Langkawi is a very vertical island.  The cable car ascends the highest peak, Gunung Machincang, which rises to 2300 ft just a couple kilometers from the ocean.  There are great views all around of Langkawi, the Andaman Sea, and on a clear day, Thailand to the north.

Here’s my lovely fiancée atop Gunung Machincang:

From the peak we had a nice view of the anchorage outside Telaga Harbour, the marina where I first took possession of Oia.  It’s pretty full — peak season in Langkawi and Phuket is underway.


Here I am enjoying the view from the cable car:

There’s a precarious looking suspension bridge between a couple of the peaks, up in the clouds:

We enjoyed a refreshing beverage at the top of Gunung Machincang:

And then we marched across the bridge:

Back at sea level, we ran across a rabbit farm.  MYR 1 (US$0.31) to feed the rabbits was a no-brainer:

They seemed to like me kind of a lot:

Langkawi is pretty tropical.  There are a lot of coconut trees:

We watched a worker shimmy his way up to the top of one, no rope, occasionally hacking out a foothold with a machete, to harvest some coconuts.  North of Cenang, near the airport, we came across a quiet little beach with a few small laksa stands and locals lounging around.  The laksa was so-so — kind of fishy — but the setting sure was nice.

The little old lady running the laksa stand was really skillful in hacking apart a coconut for us with a heavy sharp knife — very instructive, and very tasty.

Langkawi is a duty free island and there are tons of duty free shops all over the place.  The big product categories: alcohol, kitchenware, and chocolate.

But instead of visiting the duty free shops, which are all the same, it’s a lot more fun to track down the daily night market, which is in a different spot on the island every night.  It’s mostly full of street food, really cheap and decently good.  You can put a pretty big meal together for about US$2-5.  On a rainy day, like the night we visited the market in Kedawang near Cenang, the market is kind of a sloppy, muddy affair — but still busy and fun.

Back at the boatyard, where half our time was still being spent, lots of stuff was underway.  The yard began preparing the topsides, filleting out scratches for fairing, and sanding the paint to prepare for overcoating.

Once that was done, the next step was some fairing, then masking and spraying on some epoxy primer.

The guys spent a day or two wet sanding the epoxy to a smooth finish.  On our way out Sunday, they were in the middle of spraying on three coats of topcoat.  I went with CMP, a Japanese brand, for all the paint and epoxy for this refit.  It’s at least as good as International or Awlgrip (paint) and West System (epoxies), and has a great reputation, but is quite a bit cheaper since it’s sold mainly to the shipping industry rather than to the yachting crowd.

Barry just sent me a couple photos today of the finished and polished topsides, which look great:

The next big paint job will be the deck, including some nice gritty nonskid; but first a bunch of glasswork needs to get done.  The antifouling is actually still in decent shape so we’ll do that last, cleaning up the surface and then just painting on one or two new coats.

While all that was going on I was working on some smaller tasks.  I removed all the old solar panels and got a welder to grind off some of the mounting tabs and re-weld them to fit the new panels; then got the new panels all wired up.  They’re working well so far.

I also dismantled the old pedestal guard, drilled and epoxy-sealed a through-deck hole to run wiring, and mounted the new pedestal guard I’d had fabricated in Singapore.  Forgot to get a photo of that.  The hardest part of the job was running all the chartplotter wiring — mostly data cables with fat connectors, so I had to cut the cables, run them through, and re-solder all the conductors.  I still have one more to go — a VHF remote mic I just picked up in Singapore — before I can reseal and bolt down the pedestal guard.

I handed off all my teak to the yard’s carpenter, who is pretty well equipped and will make a nice finger-jointed enclosure for the chartplotter.  I was struggling to make any progress on that myself.  Some of the rest of the teak will go toward steps on a new folding boarding ladder.

I took stock of my deck level nav lights, which are really power hungry, to see if I could convert them to LEDs like I did with the anchor and tricolor lights.  I found the fittings — from Peters+Bey — were in pretty bad shape, so I’ll probably just replace them with all-new LED lights.

I also brought the outboard to the local Mercury shop for general servicing.  That entailed a fun drive out to a little kampung well away from town.  Turns out I had been right in my fuel leak diagnosis originally: the fuel tank was cracked and leaking.  They ordered a new one for me and now the outboard’s in good shape.

I spent an hour or two with my head in the chain locker.  Since the chain was out it seemed like a good opportunity to clean up, and I scooped out a bunch of dried up mud.  I also better cable-tied some of the windlass wiring.  One of the projects I had been pondering was installing a strong point in the chain locker for the bitter end of the anchor rode.  Right now, there’s a length of nylon bent on to the end of the rode, and spliced around a chunk of teak, which acts as a shock absorber and stopper to keep the bitter end from running out.  The teak and nylon were actually in better shape than I remembered and don’t need replacement.  Since this is generally accepted as a kosher way to secure the bitter end, and I don’t have anywhere except a bulkhead that goes through to the V-berth (right where my head usually rests when I’m sleeping there) to attach a strong point, I think I’m going to stick with it for now.

Meanwhile, Pete got the new engine down in the engine bed and started fitting it to the bearers.

After some tweaking he ended up fabricating some new mounts in his shop.  He gave them to me to paint fire-engine red with some Hammerite:

As I mentioned before, the new gearbox was a lot shorter than the old one and there was no good way to place the engine such that the old prop shaft was long enough.  C’est la vie.  Pete had a new one machined, almost exactly the same as the old one but 6 or 7 inches longer:

The prop also needed to be changed since my old engine was left-handed and the new engine is right-handed in ahead.  Turns out Pete had an almost exact mirror of my old 3-bladed fixed pitch manganese bronze prop in his shop; he had a machine shop remove a bit of material to reduce the diameter and pitch a little per my prop calculations, and cleaned it up — looks pretty nice.

I heard from Pete the other day that the engine installation is now all but finished: just a couple more minor tasks like tweaking the shift and throttle cables, replacing the cutless bearing, etc.  He powered up the engine for the first time and it ran smoothly.  The one remaining question is whether we can install a waterlock box, which protects the engine from flooding through the exhaust.  For some strange reason there is not currently one in the exhaust system.  The space constraints make installing one a little hard but we may be able to custom-make something.

Before we left for Singapore I went over a bunch of other random jobs with Barry so he can proceed with them over the next couple weeks.  There are a couple big ones, especially some fiberglassing and fairing around the cockpit, re-working the dodger, building the bimini, and painting the deck.  And there are a lot of small jobs: replacing a through-hull for the watermaker intake, moving the anti-siphon outlet to a more sane spot, cutting holes in the water and fuel tanks to install senders for gauges, dropping out the rudder to replace the bearings, etc.

I’m planning to head back to Langkawi for a few days in another couple of weeks to do some work and check up on things.  So far though, it’s all looking great.

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Filed under deck, electrical, electronics, hull, maintenance, mechanical, photos, planning, plumbing, shopping, trips

November 2, 2011

Trip recap: Singapore to Langkawi

By Kris

A brief summary: after a much longer than expected journey, Oia is in Langkawi on the hard stand at the B&V yard a few miles from Kuah.  It was quite an adventure: we departed One 15 Marina at dawn on October 20 and the boat was finally out of the water around 3pm October 29.  The trip was probably around 450nm plus or minus a few dozen.  Unfortunately I don’t have the GPS track yet as I forgot to pull it off the chartplotter before heading back to Singapore.  I’m working this week and heading back up to Langkawi next week to oversee some of the refit work.

The night before departure Charlene and Wayne helped me get everything all tidied up and ready to go.  Wayne, who found us via this blog and is thinking of buying a boat himself, was the only crew aboard for the trip.  He and I powered out of the marina right on time around 07:00 on the 20th and left berth M3, where Oia‘s been for over a year and a half, for the last time:

I was a little sad to leave One 15 and won’t be “living aboard” in Singapore anymore; but it’s exciting to move forward.  The next time the boat is back in Singapore we’ll really be cruising.

As we got underway there were zero issues with the engine and we timed our departure with a nice westerly current of at least a couple knots, so we were well underway pretty quickly.  We cleared immigration at the Western Q&I Anchorage before 9am.  Here’s the immigration boat coming alongside to collect our paperwork:

Wayne posed for a quick shot while we waited for immigration:

We made quick progress on the first day of the trip thanks to timing the tidal currents effectively.  We were mostly motorsailing in light winds.  We got out of Singapore and around the corner of Johor with a helping current, and were making way well to the north by nightfall.  After we cleared the westernmost anchorage in the Singapore Strait I took a nap and left Wayne at the helm.  He saw a couple water spouts in the afternoon:

The autopilot had control of the vessel for the vast majority of the trip:

I have to say I was a little disappointed in the autopilot this time around.  It really struggles in light winds, which is fair enough.  But I found it struggling in various other situations too.  In particular, any time it needed to make a fairly large correction; or any time I turned it on without completely straightening out the rudder first; it really had issues keeping a course.  Perhaps I can tune some parameters.  The autopilot may also have a wind vane mode which I should try.  I really wish there was some way to have different control strategies based on wind speed and angle of sail, but I guess that’s asking a little much.

By sunset we were nearing Batu Pahat and still motoring and motorsailing:

Overnight things started getting “interesting”.  Right around sunset the NDC-4 NMEA multiplexer died after just about 12 hours of service.  I was not happy, having spent a lot of the previous weekend getting it all wired up.  It was multiplexing GPS, AIS, and wind instrument data.  Luckily I had a spare serial cable and opted to just hook the AIS directly to the chartplotter.  We were without a wind instrument for the rest of the trip.  I need to get in touch with Actisense to see if there’s any chance the item is still under warranty.

Just before dawn on the 21st a nasty grinding noise came from the gearbox and I took the engine out of gear.  When Wayne woke up I spent some time trying to diagnose the issue.  I had been regularly topping up the ATF over the course of the previous day since the gearbox has been leaking oil.  That was not the issue.  We were in light winds so I strapped on a snorkle to take a look at the prop.  It wasn’t fouled.  We resolved ourselves to sailing the rest of the way, with 380+ nm to go.  We were still able to run the engine in neutral on occasion to keep the batteries well charged, but were never able to get the engine back in gear.

After that the big story of the trip was tidal currents.  In the Malacca Straits tidal currents are really strong, often over 2 kts.  On flood tides the current is to the SE into shore; on ebb tides to the NW away from shore.  We were heading generally NW, so a lot of the trip was 6ish hour periods of decent progress followed by 6ish hours of total frustration.  As it’s the inter-monsoon period, winds were light and variable most of the time — a lot lighter than I had expected from forecasts.  Frequently we found ourselves sailing in place or drifting, calling approaching tugs and fishing boats on the radio and asking them to avoid us.

There are a couple busy ports along the way — Malacca and Port Klang — with quite a few ships anchored or approaching from the main channel.  We got lucky in both cases and were able to sail through the anchorages in daylight:

North of Port Klang the Strait opens up and traffic eases.  There are fewer big ships and tugs around, and many more trawlers:

In some spots between Port Klang and Pangkor we ran across big gangs of trawlers in many-mile long lines, heading out from port and then back again one after another.  Breaking through the trawling convoys took some care in light winds.  You can’t come too close to the boats since they’re dragging nets that are hundreds of meters long; but if you try to give them too much space, there’s always another one bearing up behind.  The most annoying thing about these boats is their curiosity.  In the daytime, it’s not so bad if a fishing boat rolls up within a couple hundred meters to take a look and wave hello.  But in the dark of night when all you can see are lights and a blip on the radar, an approaching vessel that’s not answering on the radio and is heading right for you faster than you can dodge is a little nerve wracking.

In contrast, cargo ships and tankers like this one from Vietnam, the Thai Binh Bay, are pretty easy to deal with.  They show up on AIS so you can address them on the radio directly (“Thai Binh Bay, Thai Binh Bay, this is sailing vessel Oia, come in please”); they’re actually listening and usually respond; and best, they can see us on AIS too and tend to actively avoid.

As we transitioned from the Malacca Strait to the Andaman Sea in the Indian Ocean, the weather entered a distinctive pattern: dead calm or very light winds most of the night and through the morning; then a breeze picking up from the WSW in mid afternoon and building up to 10-12 kts around sunset, allowing for some decent progress:

Every day, the air was being sucked from the WSW into a low pressure system building over land to the NNE.  Either just before or just after nightfall, the system would decide it had enough strength and head out to sea.  When you could see them coming, the squalls would look pretty nasty:

These are essentially the famous “Sumatra” storms, except at this time of year they seem to be coming from the NE instead of the SW.  They’re known for blowing around 30-40kts for a couple hours, stirring up a lot of commotion, and then fading away as quickly as they came.  During the first of the squalls, when we weren’t quite sure what we were dealing with, we rode the storm out reefed and mostly hove to just trying to keep things comfortable.  The wind was about 30-35kts for each of the nightly squalls.

Usually the squalls brought along some driving rain.  Here’s a shot of the radar imagery from the heart of a squall about 15mi north of Pangkor island:

One of the squalls broke a becket on one of the mainsheet blocks.  Luckily it held out until morning and Wayne noticed it.  I replaced it with a spare.  Unfortunately the only spare blocks I had lying around were all on swivel shackles, so we had to periodically untwist the mainsheet:

Over the course of the trip we were pretty frequently accompanied by various little seabirds.  Often they’d fly right into the cockpit and relax for a few hours.  The first one appeared in the middle of the night and I didn’t notice.  I saw something dark on the deck and grabbed it; it squawked angrily and fluttered a bit in reaction.

The birds were very friendly.  Here’s a shot Wayne took while I was asleep:

They were also just kind of funny to watch.  Silly bird, you are not a bat, you are a bird!

By the time we were within range of Penang it was already the 26th, a couple days after I’d been planning to get to Langkawi.  Wayne needed to disembark — he needed to be in Penang for a meeting by the evening of the 27th, and it was clear we wouldn’t make it to Langkawi in time for him to catch a ferry back.  Unfortunately offloading crew is not as easy as just sending them to shore with a passing fisherman: we had yet to do immigration clearance into Malaysia since we had been planning to sail straight to Langkawi and do the paperwork there.  For Wayne to get into Penang it seemed like the boat would have to go into Penang too.  I made a lot of calls on the 26th and 27th trying to arrange a tow into one of the marinas.  We were unable to sail in because the current in Penang’s main channel often exceeds 4+ kts.  The only semi-firm offer I ever got to give us a tow was from a tugboat that wanted to charge us 500 MYR/hour starting from when they mobilized.  At the time we were about 8 miles W of Penang and would probably need to pay them US$2-3k for the tows in and out of a marina on the E side of Penang.  Not very feasible.  None of the actual marinas themselves seemed at all capable of either towing us themselves or even finding someone who could.

In the end Charlene found and forwarded me some info about Marina Batu Uban, which is run by Jabatan Laut (the Marine Department of Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport) and I gave them a call.  Didn’t seem very promising at first, but after some time they called back and said they’d sent a “rescue boat”.  That was alarming because we weren’t in any distress and I was concerned we’d be liable for some sort of mobilization, but it was too late.

A little over an hour later a big Maritim Malaysia RIB with two huge outboards and a crew of four powered up to us and did a little tour around Oia to check us out, then approached.  The captain asked simply, “How can we help you?”  I explained our situation and we resolved that I (the master of the boat) could hitch a ride back to shore with them, run into town, and do immigration paperwork; then hitch a ride back out with them to Oia; and then send Wayne off with them back to shore.  So around 12:30 on the 27th I hopped into their RIB with our passports and other paperwork and left Oia with Wayne and a Maritim Malaysia officer to sail around (or mostly drift in dead calm) while I zoomed into Penang:

That was quite an experience.  With a combined 500HP or so we made it almost 30 miles around the N of Penang and into Tanjong City Marina near downtown Georgetown in a little under an hour.  I had stopped there overnight before on the original trip from Langkawi to Singapore, but never really went into town.  The captain said they’d wait for me at the marina for half an hour or so, but he didn’t know exactly where the immigration office was.  To make things even more exciting, it was about 13:30, right in the middle of the usual Malaysian extended lunch hour when almost nobody is around.  There was no one at the marina to ask for directions, so I just went running off into town.

I got lucky and spotted a Customs (“Kastam”) office quickly; but there was nobody there.  I wandered through the whole building just looking for someone, and luckily ran into a clerk on his way out the door.  He told me the immigration office was “down the street, then turn right, then go to the end and find the brown building”.  That was good enough for me to track down a building a quarter mile away with a little sign with the word “Imigresen” which was bustling with activity.  Turned out to mostly be people waiting around for the Imigresen officers to come back from lunch, but a kind soul was nice enough to point me to the shipping office and miraculously they weren’t out for lunch.  It didn’t take them long to stamp our passports.

After that I wasn’t sure if I should find the Harbormaster’s office and do port clearance, or if I could get away with just waiting until Langkawi.  The Imigresen officers told me the Harbormaster was just next door and with a little effort I found it, up a few flights of stairs in back of a nearby building.  Out to lunch, but just as I was giving up a clerk returned.  I started filling out the paperwork while explaining the situation and she seemed to think I could get away with waiting until Langkawi, so I apologized and ran off and down the street and found the marina again, and dashed down the dock, hopped in the RIB, and chatted for a minute with the crew while they waited for the captain to get back to the boat.  Then we zoomed off and an hour later found Oia safe and sound.

What little I saw of Georgetown seemed nice; maybe while I’m in Langkawi I’ll have time to take a ferry down there for a day or two to give it the visit it seems to deserve.

In only a few minutes Wayne and I exchanged places and all his gear was loaded onto the Maritim Malaysia boat; then they turned off and zoomed away with lots of waving and smiles.  Here’s a photo Wayne snapped of me as they powered off:

So, the moral of that story is that Maritim Malaysia are friendly guys and if you’re ever in trouble near Penang, give Marina Batu Uban a call and they’ll probably find a way to help you out.

All that happened in just a few hours so by 15:30 or so I was all alone aboard Oia, a little bewildered, and with not much breeze, and still 60 or so miles south of Langkawi.  We’d only made about 45 miles in the last 30 hours, but I was still hoping to get to Langkawi by the following day.  To start with, since the seas and skies were clear, I took a shower, aired the boat out a bit, and made myself a nice big pasta dinner.

The usual afternoon breeze from the WSW didn’t really materialize until around 17:30 or later so things weren’t looking promising at first.  But after dark around 20:00, just as I was getting ready to start a cycle of 20 min nap; alarm; look around; repeat, the evening’s squall roared in from the NE and it was a good one.  I decided to sail instead of heave to, and with 2.5-ish reefs in the mainsail and about 1/3 of the jib I sustained 6-7+ kts for much of the night:

The wind never really died and in the morning it was still pushing 15-20 kts, and as the sun rose Langkawi was less than a mile away.

To get into the yard I needed to enter the channel between Pulau Langkawi and Pulau Dayang, and I decided to do that from the east which if timed well would be with a helping tidal current.  I had to beat upwind and against current a bit to get to the channel entrance just S of Kuah.  Around then I called up the yard and found out they weren’t open: Friday is the Muslim day of Prayer.  So I wasn’t getting out of the water despite my breakneck overnight sail.  Barry told me to anchor just S of the yard and we’d figure the haulout out in the morning.

The channel entrance is a bit narrow and cluttered:

But with a helping current of 2+ kts I didn’t find it particularly difficult.  I turned through a nice reach and then into a dead run as I cleared the channel:

I passed RLYC and various anchorages off Kuah town and continued westward for a couple miles.  There were some big square-riggers anchored in the channel for some kind of regatta or other:

Anchoring off the B&V yard turned out to be really hard.  The current was still pushing through the channel at 2+ kts to the SW, and the channel was open enough that the NE wind was still around 15 kts.  As I approached the spot I reefed all the way down to a small sliver of mainsail but still found myself moving at 2.5 kts and unable to turn upwind against the current, which was pushing the boat ashore really rapidly.  In 18ft about 300m from shore I decided to just drop the anchor rather than try to get any closer.

Somewhere over the course of the trip the chain shifted over on itself.  The anchor dropped about 10ft and stopped dead and the boat continued drifting into shore.  I very quickly hauled it back up; dashed back to the cockpit; unfurled the sails; and jibed through to turn away from shore.  Then I had to fight against the wind and the current for about 1.5 hours to get another chance.  In between tacks I managed to unshift the anchor chain.

The second time around was equally harrowing but the chain was free and the anchor caught in deep mud, stopping the boat with a very noticeable lurch.  Since the anchorage was very unprotected and the current bimodal I let out almost 150ft of chain and put on a snubber.  No dragging all night and I ended up getting a great night of sleep.

In the morning B&V arranged for a RIB from RLYC with a nice 40HP engine to buzz over and tow me into the wharf.  That went quite well except for a small slip and fall while I was running around tying fenders.  I cut up both my feet on some shrouds, the right worse than the left, and bled all over the deck for a few minutes.  Finally just went to a doctor back in Singapore this morning and picked up some antibiotics, but it seems to be fine.  I should’ve had my deck shoes on: no excuse.

B&V then worked on getting the crane ready for the haulout:

There was some brief confusion over whether the yard could handle a boat as heavy as Oia (15 NRT) but that seemed to resolve itself somehow.  (Maybe just with “eh, whatever, let’s try and see” — hard to tell.)

By around 14:30 the boat was out of the water:

And 45 mins or so later it was on stilts next to the wharf (here in progress):

The boat was supposed to be Travelifted away from the wharf and into a semi-permanent spot in the yard later in the day, but I had to pack up my stuff and zoom off to town to do port clearance paperwork before the offices closed; and then I buzzed over to the airport and got standby on a flight back to Singapore.

Pete, my repower engineer, is over looking at the boat today and putting a plan together for the engine installation.  I’m planning to fly back up to Langkawi next Tuesday to get all the other random jobs (painting, some fiberglass work, some welding, some carpentry, and so on) underway.

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Filed under deck, electronics, hull, maintenance, mechanical, paperwork, photos, trips

October 16, 2011

Trip prep; NMEA wiring

By Kris

I’ve set most project-type tasks aside to get Oia tidied up for next week’s trip.  At this point everything’s mostly in order: decently well provisioned (except for perishables which I’ll pick up the day before we sail), most stuff stowed and lashed down, most systems tested and working, safety equipment in place, backup anchors ready, etc.  I still need to dump some ATF in the leaky gearbox and run the engine in gear for a little while to be totally confident it’s up to the job of getting us far out enough to raise sails; but I’m waiting until later next week as it seems kind of silly to just have all the ATF leak out again before we depart.  CIQP paperwork is all ready to deliver to MPA.

I spoke with the B&V yard in Langkawi on the phone.  The engine still hasn’t arrived but the local delivery company has made all the arrangements with the yard to get it there by Monday or Tuesday.  Seems like delivering it to a company (B&V) instead of a private individual complicated matters quite a bit.  Who knew.

I noticed when doing some battery testing last week that the DCSM, while giving proper current draw readings, was not integrating them so it always reported the batteries as totally full.  In the end I had to factory reset the unit and recalibrate it to get it working again.  All in all I can’t say I’ve been very impressed by the unit, but at least it’s working again now.

Tonight I noticed that my inter-bulkhead lifelines that will eventually be for lee cloths have become glorified clothes lines, which is pretty much what I was predicting after I first got them installed:

The one project I did spend some time on yesterday and today was finally getting my Actisense NDC-4 NMEA multiplexer all wired up and tested.  Took me almost a year to get around to it, but now I can finally see AIS and wind data on both my chartplotter and laptop.  I still haven’t figured out why the autopilot isn’t sending out heading messages though.  Anyway, here’s a  screenshot from the chartplotter with GPS, AIS, wind, and radar data.  Until I can get compass heading data on the network I can’t align the radar and overlay it on the chart.

This evening Charlene cooked up a tasty meal aboard; it’s probably her last night on Oia for a while and the next time she sees the boat it will be pretty significantly transformed.  I can’t wait to get the refit underway.

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October 10, 2011

A mostly preparatory weekend

By Kris

Almost ready to sail up to Langkawi.  We spent most of the weekend at the boat cleaning, organizing, and tying up loose ends.  The dockbox finally got emptied out after a year and a half of accumulation of random stuff.  Thanks to Charlene’s iron fist a lot of it went right in the trash.  Together we make a good team when it comes to throwing stuff out: we both eye each other’s “this might be useful in the future” items dispassionately and force each other to downsize.

I’m still carrying quite a load of cargo up to Malaysia: there are a lot of things I haven’t gotten around to installing yet here in Singapore that I’m hoping to get done there or in Phuket.  The V-berth will be full of teak and solar panels while we’re sailing; maybe a bunch of spare polycarbonate glass too unless I can find some way to offload that here.  It’s worth a bit too much to throw away.

Last week I picked up all the fire extinguishers from servicing.  The big Halon extinguisher needed a refill.  Technically new Halon is outlawed but there are some shops that recycle it.  It really seems like the best extinguishing agent to have around your engine anyway, so I’m glad I was able to get the unit serviced instead of replaced:

I confirmed with Beta Marine that the engine is scheduled for delivery in Langkawi this week, either Monday or Tuesday.  I’ll refrain from celebrating until I’ve verified it’s arrival.

There are a couple lovely powerboats — sister vessels from the US, both Nordhavn 62s — in One 15 right now.  Here is the Grey Pearl, just off my bow:

And here is the Seabird, just off my starboard quarter:

As it happens, these vessels have basically just done the reverse of the trip we’re planning.  If I can find some time, I’ll wander over for a chat.

After seeing some of the Indonesian dockhands fishing from the docks, catching and cooking dinner almost every day (and breakfast and lunch too, often enough), we finally decided to grab a fishing line and give it a go ourselves.  I don’t think we are quite as capable fishermen, sadly, and all our efforts resulted in naught.  It was fun, anyway:

I am planning to pick up some good heavy line and trolling lures.  I can’t think of any excuse not to — trolling is cheap and (relatively) easy.

Sunday, Wayne and his family came by to go over the boat and our route to Langkawi.  They brought along some tasty mutton curry and naan.  As it turns out naan is pretty easy to make and doesn’t need an oven.  We’re adding it to our cruising recipe book.  I have also been on the lookout for a pressure cooker after hearing Rachel’s recommendation.  So far the cheapest one I’ve seen was S$330 (~US$260), but I have a few leads to follow on cheaper ones.  Wayne and family showed us their thermal cooker, which is a different concept: slow cooking, but no energy use after initially boiling water.  I think it’s probably a bit more limited in what it can cook than a pressure cooker, but I can imagine boiling water in the morning for coffee or oatmeal or something, pouring the extra water in the thermal cooker, and having hot rice ready for lunch.  Tough decision.

After Wayne and co left, I found myself digging around in a cockpit locker and decided to do some work on the autopilot.  I greased the drive chain, and then tried to get NMEA compass data, for use in aligning radar imagery, out of the drive unit.  Turns out the headers for those NMEA lines are inside the unit, so I had to dismantle the whole autopilot to wire it up:

The only way to test it was to get everything put back together and in place.  Sadly, no compass data was forthcoming.  I’ll have to debug that a little more this week.

Lastly, here’s a nice photo of Oia I took Friday.  Not much longer till she sails away from M3 at One 15 for good.

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October 5, 2011

Mainsail; some small projects; route planning

By Kris

The clock is ticking and in just a couple weeks I’ll be heading up to Langkawi to haul out and start major refit work.  In the meantime I’m still working on a bunch of little tasks.

Over the weekend I unfurled the decrepit old mainsail to try and get it hauled up as well as possible — it started sagging last year in Tioman and I hadn’t gotten around to dealing with it since.  The real problem is the tiny little halyard that is supposed to hold the whole thing up: it has to be small since the sail furls around it.  It tends to sag a little and the sail slips down 6″ or so, which causes furling problems.

I found that cleaning and lubricating the track on the boom made a big difference in the ease of unfurling the sail; a little less so with refurling.  The sail is a mess:

The obvious ugliness is the missing sunbrella that we had to cut off in Tioman.  There’s also some yucky green stuff that’s built up where water infiltrates the sail during rainstorms, since the furling hasn’t been very snug.  I didn’t get around to it last week but I should be able to just scrub that away with some soap and water.  It’s not worth doing any real repairs to the sail, since I’ll be getting a new one (and eliminating the furling system) in a couple months.

Anyway, a couple trips up and down the mast to attach and remove a real halyard, plus some cranking, got the sail where it needed to be and now it’s snugly furled.

I spent a bit too long cutting, filing, and sanding some teak standoffs for the electrical panel; the standoffs will go on either side of the panel, with hinges on one side and a latch on the other, for a simple acrylic cover to protect the panel switches.  It has been a bit too common of an occurrence for us to lean over to reach into the fridge and accidentally flip a switch on the panel — including the autopilot on a couple occasions.  This will prevent that from happening.  Anyway, here are the standoffs — I only need three but I made a fourth smaller one to try it out:

I also bought all the hardware for that project; just need to get an acrylic panel cut and then I can work on mounting it all.

I’ve been working on some stuff for installing lee cloths (sea bunks, basically) in the salon.  I’m adding a tight PVC-coated lifeline between the two main bulkheads above each settee; that will provide the upper support for the lee cloths.  I picked up the lifeline with some snap shackles spliced on last week, and bought some hardware for bulkhead mounting, and installed all that last night.  Here’s the wire over the starboard settee:

It fits almost perfectly: I need to go pick up a couple extra oversize washers to add as spacers.  The snap shackles are just clipping to an eye-bolt through the bulkheads:

I like the whole arrangement even without lee cloths attached since it provides a nice pseudo-handrail and/or clothesline.

Last night I installed a new shower head — actually, a bidet spray head which minimizes wasted water.  The old one had sprung a leak.

I’ve been taking more showers in the boat lately, I guess because I’m always in a rush and the trip up to the marina facilities and back — while not exactly a “trek” — still gobbles up a lot of time.  I tried the new shower head this morning and it was decent enough.

A couple other recent acquisitions: 7m of 8mm galvanized proof coil chain for use with the secondary anchor rode (still need to figure out a good way to store it, maybe just a bucket); and a nice Racor RFF8C filtering funnel, which I used last night to filter ~110L of diesel I had in jerry cans.  It worked like a charm and kept quite a bit of particulate crap (and a little bit of water) out of my main fuel tanks.

Earlier this week I put together a basic route for the trip up to Langkawi.  I’ve been playing with the NGA charts that were recently released and have been set upon by the open source community for validation and georeferencing.  They’re really good, particularly as a supplement to electronic charts.  Anyway, here’s a screen capture from my planning:

The trip from Singapore to Langkawi is really very straightforward on a map: you’re just following the coast NW for 450 nm or so.  There’s only so much route planning to be done.  What’s actually complex about it are the dynamic obstacles enroute, since the Malacca Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and also happens to be scattered with zillions of fishing nets laid everywhere but the main shipping lanes.  This time around, since I’m expecting to be mostly under sail, I’ve also been doing some tidal analysis in hopes of navigating the tidal currents for maximum benefit (by being closer to shore during ebb tide, when tidal current is to the NW) and minimum detriment (by being farther from shore during flood tide, when tidal current is to the SE).  Time will tell if we actually feel like bothering with that, or if we’ll be too busy avoiding submerged nets and supertankers.

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September 28, 2011

A lot of random little progress

By Kris

I haven’t been focusing on any one big task lately since my todo list before shipping up to Langkawi next month is just full of a zillion little things.  My plan now is to head up to Langkawi to begin the repower and a bunch of other refitting around Oct 20 with Wayne (and anyone else who has the time and inclination) as crew.  I’ll fly back to Singapore in November sometime to return to work, but the boat will stay in Langkawi until mid-December; then Charlene and I will fly back and sail her up to Phuket, and we’ll leave her there and fly back to Singapore until mid January.  And then, finally, it’ll be time for us to head back up to Phuket, finish a last bit of refitting, and start cruising!  The boat will probably be back in Singapore for a few days in late February or early March before we head East.  In the meantime: thank goodness for budget airlines.

Did a few tests of the good old Westerbeke recently and it’s still running fine aside from the transmission leak.  Need to stock up on ATF to keep it lubricated on the trip to Langkawi.  Last night I broke out some wrenches and tightened up the engine mounts as best I could — they were pretty loose, which was causing vibration, which was probably the cause of the whole transmission leak in the first place.  The engine alignment is probably a little out of whack but it should be fine for light use over a few days.  All in all it’s still a fine engine and could probably last another 50 years — with a level of care I’m unable to provide, unfortunately.

Supposedly the new engine should arrive in Malaysia today, and in Langkawi not too long after.  We’ll see.

Last week I picked up a Lifesling — or rather, a European equivalent, which is what was available in Singapore:

Here’s a fun little video from a decade or two ago explaining the concept.  I don’t have an accompanying lifting block and tackle but I think between the sling itself, my boarding ladder (soon to be replaced with one with more rungs) and all the various halyards and sheets lying around, getting aboard isn’t as big a concern as getting back to the boat in a MoB situation.

I’ve also been planning the installation of some lee-cloths for the settees in the main cabin.  The particulars of Oia‘s layout have me planning an approach similar to this guy’s (scroll halfway down the page): running some PVC-coated lifeline between big eye bolts through the bulkheads fore and aft of the settees, and tying off the lee-cloth to that.  (The other secure option is bolts through the deck, which I don’t want.)  There are added pseudo-handrail and pseudo-clothesline benefits to the lifeline idea.  I may put the eye bolts and lifelines in place before leaving Singapore, but I probably won’t get the lee-cloths themselves made here.

Over the weekend, Charlene was in an organizing mood and she ripped through the boat like a little tornado shifting things around, demanding explanations for mysterious items (many of which I had no good explanations for and ended up in the trash, including about five bottles of mysterious Thai household cleaners), measuring cabinet and cubbyhole capacities, and so on.  She’s also started shifting some stuff from her house over to the boat, so a little more of Oia‘s vast storage capacity is finally being put to use.

I’ve been having a tough time edge gluing teak boards into bigger planks, which I want to use to make an enclosure for the chartplotter.  I’ve been using a simple PVA glue so far, with the process going something like:

  1. Sand the joint faces with 80G
  2. Rub some acetone into the joint faces to clean them and repel the oil in the wood, which would inhibit adhesion
  3. Slather a bunch of PVA on one of the joint faces, line it up with the other face, press together, and slide back and forth to spread the glue
  4. Clamp using spacers and a couple bar clamps
  5. Clean off the excess PVA with a damp cloth
  6. Wait patiently.

One thing I’ve learned is you really have to wait patiently and also be gentle when cleaning off the excess glue.  Last night I laid up the same pair of boards four times because I’d clean off the excess glue on the top of the lay-up; wait a little while; flip it over to clean the excess from the bottom; and make the whole thing fall apart.  And, a few hours has proven not enough time to wait before removing the clamps; pretty much I need to leave them in place overnight.  I think the humidity here is a factor, and I’ve ended up with a couple of planks where the glue line is visibly porous after drying despite lots of excess when first laying up.  Anyway, I think I’m going to switch to epoxy for the rest of the lay-ups.

Yesterday I finally soldered and crimped together a huge N-connector on the lead for my omnidirectional wifi antenna I built a while back.  I also picked up an N-to-SMA connector so I can hook the antenna up to most USB wifi adapters (including the one I have), struggled with Linux kernels for a few minutes, and then tested the antenna out.  Looks like I get a pretty consistent 5-6 dB gain over the smaller antenna that ships with the wifi adapter — decent, and about what I was expecting.  I think I may epoxy coat the antenna (to protect against corrosion), enclose it in some small-diameter PVC pipe, and mount it over the stern pushpit near the solar panels.

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